High-speed data sources play an important role in third generation mobile/personal communications. To meet the required Quality of Service (QoS), various Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols are used in wireless networks. Among them, the Radio Link Protocol (RLP) provides an octet stream transport service over physical channels with a best effort recovery capability. A burst control method enables efficient use of radio resources by accommodating the bursty nature of traffic. With optimized RLP and burst assignment algorithms, data services can be improved in throughput and latency.
In standard Automatic Repeat Request (ARQ)-based RLP, the sender is requested for missing data to be retransmitted when errors are detected at the receiving side. A receiver is usually allowed to request for missing data R times where R is a specified integor. The number R may impose a restraint on the capability of error recovery. In the current RLP standard for CDMA, the transmission scheme is the same as the NAK scheme. This means that the number of retransmissions by the data sender is equal to the number of NAK requests it receives. In practice, NAK frames may be lost in transit. To ensure that the RLP sender is notified, the NAK is usually transmitted multiple times, with a set of consecutive NAKs being issued as a “round.” For any particular message, as identified by its sequence number, a plurality of rounds may be necessary. Each round is triggered by a failure of the message to arrive at the receiver successfully before expiry of a timer. There exists a need to relieve the amount of traffic without degrading the best-effort recovery capability.